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Ask Naomi: expecting different results

May 19, 2013

Ask Naomi: expecting different results

I really do believe that you cannot keep doing what you have always done and expect different results- this applies to the job hunting world as well. If you only apply to one type of job (librarian) or at one type of place (public library, university, etc) and you aren’t getting hired then you need to broaden your approach. Even if you are vested in a system like teachers in a state school system is it better to be unemployed or should you start looking outside the box?

1) Look at companies! I spent part of my Saturday morning looking up companies (The Motley Fool, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters etc) that I knew or found on Best Places to Work 2011 (or 2012 or 2013) lists and looking at their careers and jobs pages. Often we don’t do the due diligence of looking beyond jobs lists (online or newspapers) and look at companies. I have been called in for interviews from applications I put in and you could too. So these are jobs you might be missing.

2)List your skill sets! What can you do? If you have taught then you can do training. If you have done cataloging then you understand metadata. Librarians make great records management people too. What is your skill set and how can it be translated to other jobs?

These are just two ideas to start with :)

reposted from 12/12/11

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Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job).
Founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard, INALJ’s social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ.com. INALJ has had over 18.5 Million page views and helped thousands of librarians and LIS folk find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in a month.
Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 & 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro. She presents whenever she can, most recently thrice at the American Library Association's Annual Conference as well as breakout talk presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa and as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting, at the National Press Club, McGill University, the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
She was a 2013 Library Journal Mover & Shaker and has served on the University of Maryland iSchool Board from 2014-2017. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has relocated to being nomadic. She runs her husband’s moving labor website, KhanMoving.com, fixes and sells old houses and assists her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food as well. She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. View all posts by Naomi House →